Beetroot shots vs capsules: what you actually get from each

The one number, and who prints it

Nitrate is the part of beetroot the research is interested in. Your body converts some of it, by a route that starts with bacteria in your mouth, and our guide to how beetroot supports nitric oxide walks through that step properly. If you’re choosing between two products on a shelf, you need one thing from it: nitrate is the active, and nitrate is what should be on the label.

Which brings us to the awkward bit, and the industry knows it’s awkward. In 2020 the brand manager of Beet It, Jonathan Cartwright, told the trade publication NutraIngredients that “athletes are being misled by beetroot products that are not labelled with their nitrate content, or by beetroot products that do not provide an adequate dose of nitrate per serving”. He pointed at a 2018 study which found that many beetroot drinks and supplements came in below the 300mg mark, and quoted its authors: “Our data reveal marked variation between different products and often even between different samples of the same product.”

That’s a market leader talking up its own labelling, so read it with that in mind. The finding underneath it still stands, and it’s the reason the printed figure is worth anything at all. Beetroot is a vegetable. Its nitrate content varies with the soil, the season and the batch, and keeping it consistent isn’t free. Somebody has to actually do it.

Capsule labels are full of numbers, and the biggest ones don’t answer the question. Take the two UK capsule labels we could read in full. One prints “Beetroot Extract 1400mg” and “equivalent to dried root 9240mg” per two capsules. The other prints 3500mg a capsule, and tells you the product is a source of dietary nitrates without saying how much. Both figures describe how much beetroot went in. Nitrate is one component of that, and neither label tells you how much of it you’re getting.

The second one is the more interesting of the two, because it does standardise. Its product information promises 0.3% betanin, at 2.1mg a capsule. Betanin is the pigment that makes beetroot red, and standardising to it is a perfectly sensible way of showing an extract is what it claims to be. It just isn’t the nitrate number, and that’s the pattern across the shelf: where a beetroot capsule does commit to a figure, it tends to commit to the compound that’s easy to measure rather than the one the research is about.

The extract ratio doesn’t settle it either. A 50:1 extract means 50 parts of root went in for one part that came out, which describes how concentrated the extract is rather than what’s in it. Ours is a 50:1 beetroot extract, and that ratio tells you no more about its nitrate than anyone else’s ratio does about theirs.

That includes our own label. Almost nobody in the capsule aisle prints the nitrate figure, and we don’t print ours. We asked our manufacturer what it is. They don’t know, there’s no figure coming, and we’d rather tell you that than let a ratio imply something it can’t support.

There’s a regulatory layer on top of all this, and it explains some of the silence. There isn’t an authorised health claim for beetroot nitrate in the EU, which is why a compliant label talks about supporting normal function rather than promising an outcome. Beet It’s managing director, Lawrence Mallinson, told NutraIngredients that the firm had no intention of applying for a European health claim at all, and that Beet It therefore carries no sports nutrition claims on this side of the Atlantic. Our own packaging works the same way, for the same reason. Boring, and correct.

Whole beetroot, and where a supplement sits

Before the comparison closes: the third option is a beetroot. Dr Michael Greger, writing up the research on NutritionFacts.org, points to a 2012 study in the Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics in which physically fit men and women ate about a can’s worth of baked beets, a cup and a half, 75 minutes before a 5K. Over the last mile they pulled ahead of the placebo group, and they did it without a higher heart rate and while reporting less exertion.

His reading of the wider evidence cuts against a lot of marketing: if the aim is performance, nitrate is ideally obtained from whole vegetables, and there’s little or no evidence of improvement from the array of products sold as nitric oxide boosters. The evidence, as he puts it, is with the vegetables.

That sits comfortably with what the UK authorities say. The NHS advice for anyone managing blood pressure starts with a healthy balanced diet and not too much salt. The British Heart Foundation names eating too much salt and not enough fruit and vegetables among the things that raise risk, and asks for a varied diet of fruit, vegetables, wholegrains and oily fish. Neither of them mentions a shot or a capsule, and that’s the right way round.

Where a supplement earns its place is on the days the plate doesn’t manage it, which for most of us is most days. It’s an addition to a diet, not a substitute for one, and none of it counts for much unless you stick with it long enough to see a trend rather than a reading.

The bottom line

A beetroot shot is concentrated juice that usually tells you its nitrate content. A beetroot capsule is a convenient daily dose that usually doesn’t. Once you’ve seen the comparison that way, most of the choosing does itself.

Go for a shot if a measured nitrate dose is the point, if you’re taking it around exercise, and if 17g of sugar in a mouthful doesn’t bother you. Go for a capsule if you want something you’ll still be taking in eight weeks, if you’d rather skip the sugar, or if you want a formula that carries more than beetroot.

On either shelf, the test is the same. Find the word nitrate and a figure in milligrams. If it isn’t printed, the product might well be fine, but nobody can tell you how it compares. We can’t print ours either, and we’d rather say so than dress a ratio up as an answer.

And whichever one you settle on, it’s the weeks that do the work, not the aisle you bought it from.

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